WHATCHA READIN'?

Stanislaus Joyce’s My Brother’s Keeper. James Joyce’s Early Years (1957) Picked up a nice used copy by chance in Gray Matters mid-August. I don’t believe I’ve read it cover to cover, more like skimmed it in a library. It was a big revelation for Joyceans in the late '50s/early '60s, but by the time I got into JJ studies, mid-80s, it had been thoroughly picked clean in other studies, notably Ellmann’s biography which I first read in 1981 or 82. And anyway, MBK mainly seemed of use for the old “spot the reference to JJ’s own experience” approach, which I was frankly dismissive of, as a scholarly bent. Stanislaus is all about their shared experiences. In a represented discussion with JJ, Stanislaus dismisses the ending of a juvenile play JJ wrote because the ending has no basis in Joyce’s own experience (i.e., JJ had no lady love in his life at the time) so SJ is criticizing his brother for inventing a woman wholesale. It’s pretty feeble as criticism but, as no one but SJ and William Archer read the play, maybe it was a feeble scene (though Archer, a publisher, found that scene to be best). It’s not to besmirch SJ that I note this but mainly to say that his rendering of JJ is steeped in “what I know about him”—which is always going to miss the big picture. But here is what SJ says much to the point: “He [JJ] maintained that art had no purpose; that all fixed purposes falsify it, but that it had a cause, namely, necessity, the imperative inward necessity for the imagination to recreate from life its own ordered synthesis. He spoke of the importance of the artist in the community, and insisted on his right to develop his personality freely in accordance with his own artistic conscience, and without being drawn into movements or making himself the mouthpiece of others. The artist inherits difficulties enough to struggle with in his own soul” (p. 129).

Reading this, I can say that that attitude is one I had in youth, that was much like my driving ideal. Since I knew little of Joyce until the end of high school, the common ground for that view might well have been Ibsen. I had an Ibsen phase around 15—though nothing like JJ’s infatuation with Ibsen as a living artist he actually corresponded with! Probably the main source is Nietzsche which SJ doesn’t speak of much except to note the part he played in creating, in Duffy of “A Painful Case,” a character somewhat based on SJ. In any case, that sense of the artist as his own criteria was clear to me and was my “test” in evaluating artworks: was the creator his own person, working from that sense of “necessity”? It’s what I embraced in Dylan whenever he turned away from what was expected of him in search of whatever he felt most compelled to do. It’s what, eventually, made me a defender/explicator of Finnegans Wake. For I believed fully in JJ’s reasons for writing it, though I never insisted that a “general reader” had any reason to read it. And that’s my view of art anyway: when it comes to “community” I don’t recognize one. Though I suppose that it is how one gets from the inward imaginative necessity to a commodity for sale in a marketplace. It must pass through “a community,” the “win friends and influence his uncle” phase. I still see writing the way I see art works: unique. Certainly, as with prints and other mechanically arrived at works you can make as many copies as you like but the notion of “supplying a market” only makes sense if there is a market—and is a market ever “a community”?  This is shown in JJ’s own career. I always loved the story of how Ulysses was published: it was done by a community; only when it went forth into the international marketplace did it have to deal with being suppressed and pirated and all that mess. Certainly I’m glad there were commercial versions of it available by my lifetime, as I am that Dylan got a contract with a major label, after winning over the “folk city community” of NYC, but how those things came about is always murky to me. In other words, how the artist gets the interest of the money-men, out to make money off his “inner necessity” by means of consumers rather than a community.

I have to say it’s a shame Stanislaus didn’t get to the Trieste years. His pointing out sources for the Dubliners stories (often from something SJ witnessed) makes me want to read them again (it’s been ages).

DB's Song of the Day (day 167): "FLOWER OF THE MOUNTAIN" (2011) Kate Bush

Today is Bloom’s Day, or Blooms’ Day if you want to commemorate Molly as well as Poldy—fitting, as we’re posting about a song Kate Bush wrote that was intended to incorporate lines taken directly from Molly Bloom’s “soliloquy” at the end of James Joyce’s Ulysses, a chapter that occurs after June 16th, somewhere in the wee hours of June 17th. But I’m one who believes “a day” (for a person) lasts from rising to sleeping, no matter how far into the next day it may be before that happens. As it happens, Molly remains awake (she was awakened by her husband’s return and wasn’t awake all night) until the cock crows for dawn.

Kate Bush was denied use of the words from Ulysses back in the late Eighties when she recorded “The Sensual World” for her album of that name, released in 1989. She substituted references to the scene Molly is recalling—as well as some flights of her own, including her lover “rescuing” something if it should fall between her breasts. Mention of Molly’s breasts features prominently in Ulysses, prominent as the appendages themselves no doubt are. But Kate’s lyric on the original release isn’t too coherent. Not that you mind, what with that sultry vocal and those Irish pipes creating that hypnotic sound. The chorus, “stepping out of the page into the sensual world,” seemed to be all about a woman’s sexual awakening, one of those Paolo and Francesca moments as in Dante—“and that day we read no more.” They found something more involving to do.

In 2011 Kate Bush released a new version of the song, retitled “Flower of the Mountain”—a line from Ulysses—and incorporating the passages she initially wanted to use. I don’t know if it’s a better song than “The Sensual World” because, for one thing, Kate’s voice has deepened and lost some of that pixie-ish elasticity that made her songs so immediately recognizable. There’s much more liveliness in the original, and the lyrics present the speaker as something of a cock-tease: “And his spark took life in my hand” followed by “I said, mmh yes, but not yet.” Ouch.  And Kate also has her girl thinking about Machiavellian girls which might make us think of a certain chanteuse's evocation of “material girls.” Yep, this chick is weighing all the options.

Molly, of course, is very cunning and very canny all through her long monologue, but the passages Kate incorporates are all about the very sensual feeling of deep kisses and recognizing, in a certain man’s longing and hunger for her own body, just how exciting that body can be. So that “Stepping out of the page into the sensual world” is still about a moment of awakening, but, with the use of such readily identifiable text, the song also seems to allude to the kind of stirring that might occur when reading racy lit and deciding to go off and get some o’ that. Of course, the legal decree that declared Ulysses was not obscene for U.S. purposes—12 years after the book was initially published—held that the book would not stir sexual desire and salacious thoughts. That’s as may be, but if Molly’s comments don’t stir you a little—either to recall some great sensual moments of your own or to make you make a note of seeking out the same at some not so remote juncture—then I wonder about you, frankly.

Anyway, the latter-day Kate has a deeper voice and maybe that suits this material even better than her voice in 1989 would have. She’s more appreciably a woman looking back on all that palpitating heart business and she still manages some great phrasing in bits like “so he could feel my breasts all perfume”—listen to how she sounds a bit intoxicated by that perfume herself, and I really like the pause before it to make an internal rhyme: “drew him down to me / so he / could feel . . .” And her final “yes I said yes I will Yes” is shorn of all that coy “not yet” stuff.  In the book, Molly is remembering when she surrendered for the first time, “under the Moorish wall” in Gibraltar, and also the moment when she accepted the marriage proposal of her husband (of 16 years) in a field on Howth outside Dublin. So, no, she’s not refusing either event and is rather merging them as two landmark moments in her erotic life. Moments when she realizes her power to make a man do something for her and to her.

Kate begins with the Howth head recollection (which her husband has rapturously recalled earlier on June 16, 1904, the day the book is set on) of “I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth”—these two are sharing not just saliva but saliva in foodstuffs. And it was a leap year which, by the tradition, means that a woman can propose to a man. Instead she preps the memory of the seedcake with “I got him to propose to me,” so we know she didn’t actually have to pop the question herself. And the long kiss makes her lose her breath and then the compliment that sticks with her and is the title of Kate’s song: “he said I was a flower of the mountain.”

Next Kate takes us to the bit where Molly remembers Mulvey, her first real beau who gave her her first real kiss, “and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another.” Well, somebody’s got to be first, doesn’t he? (I like in the video, at this part, as the woman swings around the man’s body while their lips are glued. Nice trick.)

Then Molly quickly segues into the proposal—“and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes” and her answer is to pull him down to her breasts “all perfume” to feel “his heart was going like mad”—one of those great little Joycean touches—leading to the big Yes to it all. To sex and marriage and 16 years of suffering the life together with what pleasures there may be in that there sensual world. (The video blows that entirely, giving us the typical male superior bit with the female passive when what Joyce intends is that we see her put her arms around him and draw him down. It’s the body and breasts as offertory, a surrender, yes, but also a willful directing of his attention to her breasts and not in a maternal way, though of course that's there too. All that “earth mother” stuff. Fortunately such is not in Molly’s mind nor in Kate’s delivery.) She’s flowering and, indeed, given her married name, she’s blooming. Yes.

DB'S Song of the Day (day 33):"GOLDEN HAIR" (1970) Syd Barrett

Today is the birthday of my favorite author, James Joyce.  Joyce, if you don’t know, was the greatest prose writer of the 20th century, in English. I don’t insist he was the greatest novelist because he pretty much broke the mold, such as it was, of the novel. And though it was not a permanent effect (even if I wish it were) he did it in a rather flamboyant and non-repeatable (though perhaps imitable) fashion. He’s the bomb. But as a poet, rather less. As a poet, he’s essentially a lyricist. About this I don’t complain overmuch as I have a great respect for lyrics. It’s just that I have a hard time treating lyrics such as Joyce published as poems, per se.

Which brings us to today’s song, recorded in 1970 by Syd Barrett (him again!) for the album The Madcap Laughs. Barrett set to music and sings a lyric from Joyce’s volume Chamber Music. The lyrics have no actual title, as Joyce uses the old convention of calling the poem by its first line: “Lean Out of the Window.” Barrett entitles the song, more fittingly, “Golden Hair.” Or “Goldenhair” (Joyce had a thing for compound words).

Joyce was himself a singer and knew the words to lots and lots of songs—lyrics are included throughout his books Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Joyce never set a poem to music, to my knowledge, though some of his lyrics were set to music in his lifetime. I like to think he would have enjoyed Barrett’s “Golden Hair”; it’s quite atmospheric, creating a mood that seems to suit the poem perfectly. It’s hard for me to say, in a way, because I knew the song before I ever read Joyce’s poems.

The part that really stayed with me from this song is “I’ve left my book / I’ve left my room / For I heard you singing / Through the gloom.”  The lines suggest a sort of siren song that calls a man away from his book and his room (and his no doubt quiet, bachelor life) to seek out a voice “singing and singing a merry air”—Barrett’s vocal on that is haunting rather than “merry,” so that we feel the tension of the “gloom” and the melancholy that leads the man on, longing for the source of this “merry air” (I can’t help thinking of a man seeking in his books “surcease of sorrow” and then he’s interrupted, not by a raven at his window, but by a voice singing “on the midnight air”). When he gets to her window, we imagine, he can see her and her golden hair within. And then comes the call for her to lean out of the window, Rapunzel-like, to let him come to her. And that’s it. It’s all in the longing that the singing creates, both song and longing find their image in—and listen to how Barrett draws out the final pronouncement—“golden hair.” It becomes now her name, and the name for this entire experience. And so, the name of the song as well.

Recorded with some of his former band-mates (those Floyd guys) the song has some eerie ambient sounds moving through it, like a sustained cymbal, and nice use of echo. Probably the Barrett track I liked best immediately. Others were more of an acquired taste.

DB's Song of the Day (day 13):"SUDDENLY EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED" (1999) The Flaming Lips

On this date in 1941, James Joyce, one of the greatest writers of English prose who ever lived, gave up the ghost.  

And on this date in 1961 Wayne Coyne, the front man for the Flaming Lips, was born. While exactly twenty years apart, these two facts are unrelated. It is now my intention to relate them.

Michael Ivins, Wayne Coyne, Steven Drozd

I will do so by reference to today’s Song of the Day: “Suddenly Everything Has Changed” from the Flaming Lips’ LP, The Soft Bulletin, released in June of 1999. I first became aware of the album via my daughter on her return from her first semester in college, at the end of 1999—we became aware of the Lips due to their concert at Electric Factory, in Philly, that summer. Bulletin was one of the best LPs of that year, and this song, in particular, made an impression on me. I chose it to open a tape I made in April of 2000 called “Exordium.”

For me personally, some of the “everything” that had changed was getting used to living in what is often referred to as an “empty nest”—mind you, I don’t know that I feel my habitat is particularly nestlike or that I myself am avian in any way. I tend to side with the Big Cats (Leo, and all that), so I’ll say “empty den,”which is more to the point anyway. I was often in my den alone (my kid was in college and my wife was away most of the 1999-2000 year tending her first grandkid), and there—more of that “everything”—I was more likely to be online than at anytime in my previous 40 years of existence. I resisted the internet, but for incidental use, up til then.

Then too, some of the “everything” was going from the 20th century to the 21st century. And regard: this was still avant the horrendous election of 2000. So there was still, maybe, some hope that “everything” wouldn’t change for the worse as precipitately as it, in fact, did. I could still, at this point, reflect on the change from one century to the next in personal terms. 40 years in the 20th, and maybe 40, give or take, in the 21st. Fine.

The song gets at that personal dimension of change—or rather that moment when the scope of change becomes apparent, personally. Like when someone dies (my father-in-law died early in 2000, for instance), or when someone who was a lover no longer is, or when life with a child becomes life without a child, or vice versa. Big ticket items, pal. And the plaintiveness of Coyne’s vocal brings that home, while the arrangement of synth tones that sound like strings or even a choir at one point makes me recall the heyday of Prog Rock, so that, here, was a band who could trade on some of those musical tropes as late as the end of the century, kinda like Peter Gabriel's Genesis meets Pink Floyd. Cool.

What’s more, the lyrics manage to make mundane things—“Putting all the vegetables away / That you bought at the grocery store today,” or “Putting all the clothes you washed away / As you’re folding up the shirts you hesitate”—assume significance. Alone in my den I would actually find myself pausing during such routine tasks to remember something—like doing those same tasks (especially the groceries bit) years earlier in other apartments as my daughter went from toddler to late teen. It wasn’t so much that “everything has changed,” so much as the sameness of the task in changed circumstances got me where I lived, as they say. The mundane goes on.

And what does this have to do with James Joyce? For me and many other people, “everything changed” in the English-language novel with the publication of Ulysses in 1922, or, if you like, with that novel being legal in the U.S., less than a decade before Joyce’s death. With Joyce’s life and work everything changed and with the cessation of that life and work, we can imagine, everything changed again. The novel went on, just like those mundane tasks Coyne mentions, but somehow not ever the same again for those who took their measure of such things from good ol' JJ.

Anyone who leaves a mark is like that. There’s a before and an after. You still do what you always do, in a sense, but, in another sense, you’ve been “changed, changed utterly.”  In the Lips’ song “the clouds all form a geometric shape”—as if modernism, as it did, affected one’s very own perceptions and the very appearances themselves.

“It goes fast / You think of the past.”